Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to online advertising, and more particularly to a method for presenting advertisements which are targeted at users engaged in particular browsing activities.
Description of Related Art
With the growth of the Internet, online advertising is becoming more and more important for advertisers (buyers of advertising spaces, e.g., Coca Cola™ and Nike™). An advertiser may pay an advertising network a certain amount of money for a certain number of impressions. The advertising network may put the advertisement on web pages of different publishers (websites selling advertising space, e.g., www.yahoo.com, and www.cnn.com), displaying the advertisement when a user (anybody browsing a website) browses the publisher's website. One problem with this approach is that it may irritate users, since the advertisement may significantly reduce display areas on the web page available for content and a user may have no interest in the advertisement at all. A second problem is that it may waste an advertiser's money, since the advertiser has to pay for an impression even when a user is not interested in the advertisement.
In another approach, instead of displaying an advertisement, the advertisement network may display a link to an advertiser's web page together with a brief introduction of content of the advertiser's web page. When a user looks at the brief introduction and is interested in the advertiser's web page, he may click on the link. The advertiser may be charged a certain amount of money each time the link to its web page is clicked on. One problem with this approach is that the user may not get enough information about an advertiser's web page through the brief introduction, and so may click on the link to the advertiser's web page and only then realize it is not what he wants. This may waste the user's time and the advertiser's money. A further problem is that users may know that the links are for advertising and may simply ignore them.
Another problem with the above approaches is that they may not target specific groups of potential customers with satisfactory precision.
Therefore, it may be desirable to provide a system and method which may help to present an advertisement only to interested users so as to reduce advertisers' cost, avoid annoying disinterested users, and improve advertising effectiveness.